Clues suggest what artist was thinking

Published 6:30 am, Sunday, December 30, 2007

Acouple of years ago, at the opening of one of his rare Houston gallery shows, Robin Utterback asked Alison de Lima Greene the question that artists naturally ask at openings: What do you think?

Greene fumbled for an answer. The curator for contemporary art at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, she understood Utterback's older work — the kind of abstract paintings that most casual viewers find difficult, the kind that refuse to depict a recognizable object or tell an obvious story. The paintings seemed to be about the paint itself.

Sometimes Greene visited Utterback's big studio in Montrose, or an apartment near Rice University where he'd hang his work. She enjoyed those visits: Utterback gossiped, showed her his new stuff, and explained what he'd been thinking when he made it.

With each painting, he'd set a problem for himself — something like, Can I make a painting using only one tube of red paint and one tube of black? It turned out that there were stories hidden in his works: a problem framed, a solution found.

Utterback was good at framing problems and finding solutions, so his paintings' endings were happy. His work was collected by the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and the Menil Collection. Greene considered him one of the most important artists in Houston.

Greene hadn't caught up with Utterback since he'd spent a residency in Strasbourg, a French city near the German border, and she wondered what new twist on abstraction his Barbara Davis Gallery show would reveal.

But he'd changed far more than she expected. Suddenly his work resolved itself into recognizable images. The ornamental-looking patterns on dark backgrounds were alarming enough. But stranger still were the cartoony mask shapes that Utterback cut out of cardboard.

You could make out a little Dutch girl. An alien. A screamer, kin to Munch's famous one. The cut-outs were white, chalky-looking things, like something a kid might make.

Greene was flummoxed. She'd understood Utterback's abstractions. But what on earth was he saying with these ... faces?

"I'm having some difficulty with them," she told him at the opening. She meant to be diplomatic, and she expected him to explain. He didn't.

She worried that she hurt his feelings. She hoped that sometime later, she could make amends and wangle an explanation. But she never got the chance.

Utterback's death was nothing like the paintings Greene had admired. His death was lurid: the stuff of opera, not the stuff of abstraction.

In retrospect, a neighbor described Utterback's long-time partner, Cliff Gaylord, as "volatile." The couple lived in Utterback's big Montrose studio on Grant Street, but Utterback planned to move into a bungalow that he'd bought. And apparently, he planned to move alone. According to a TV report, in late March, he rented a U-Haul intended for Gaylord's belongings.

Gaylord didn't go quietly. Police say that on the evening of March 26, the two men fought. Gaylord stabbed Utterback repeatedly, then set his studio on fire. A neighbor saw Gaylord close the door and run; he didn't look back.

Hours later, on Heights Boulevard, Gaylord threw himself under a train. He was carrying a suicide note and confession.

Clint Willour, the Galveston Arts Center's curator, hung the show chronologically, with several works representing each of Utterback's different periods. You see the big fields of color, the focus on lines, the period when he deconstructed the canvas and painted on strange twisty shapes with holes, so that wall behind them shows through.

There are no new works from the estate — Willour didn't want the show to seem like a sales pitch — so the show ends with the Strasbourg faces from 2004 and 2005, the same mask-like shapes that stumped Greene at the Barbara Davis Gallery. For the show's catalog, to be published later, Greene has been wrestling with those faces' meaning: What was it that moved Utterback to recognizable shapes?

She can't be sure, but she believes she understands them now. Plague ravaged Strasbourg in the 1300s, and the city's art is full of demons that signify disease. She thinks Utterback may have seen those works as a metaphor for AIDS, the plague that in the 1980s and '90s decimated his own circle of friends.

More specifically, she thinks Utterback must have seen Strasbourg's old wheat-grinding mills, where flour chutes were decorated with grotesque masks. Those floury, ghostly faces were supposed to ward off disease and scare evil away.

Utterback, in his 50s, must have been pondering mortality in Strasbourg — both his dead friends' mortality and his own. But the little cardboard faces he made don't look nearly powerful enough to fend off evil. Fragile things, they seem childlike and hopelessly outmatched. They look more scared than scary.

Utterback's work was at last telling a story about something other than painting — a story about life itself. And life, unlike art, doesn't have a happy ending. Death always wins.

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Taken as a whole, though, Remembering Robin Utterback tells a different story. Utterback's death, the show argues, hasn't obliterated his work. The contest isn't between life and death; it's between art and death. And once in a great while, art wins.